Alan Watts — The Backwards Law and Why I Keep Coming Back

Try right now to fall asleep.

You can't. The moment you try, you've already failed. Sleep is one of those things that only happens when you stop aiming at it. You can set the conditions — darken the room, slow your breathing, stop looking at your phone — but the actual moment of falling asleep is not something you do. It is something that happens to you when you finally get out of the way.

This is a small fact about one specific thing. Alan Watts spent his entire career pointing out that it is not small and not specific — that this backwards quality is woven into the most important things in life. The harder you try to be happy, the more miserable you become. The more you grip a relationship, the more it suffocates. The more desperately you pursue confidence, the more self-conscious you feel. There is a whole category of things that work exactly backwards from how we instinctively approach them. Watts called this the backwards law, and once you see it you cannot stop seeing it everywhere.

I have been reading and listening to Alan Watts for years now. I come back to him the way you return to a piece of music that keeps revealing something new — not because it changes, but because you do. He died in 1973, but his lectures are all over the internet, most of them free, and they have the quality of a very good conversation rather than a sermon. He is not trying to save you. He is trying to help you see something that was already there.

A few of the Watts books — "The Wisdom of Insecurity", "The Way of Zen", "The Book" — on a shelf or a desk. Worn covers preferred. These are not display books.

The Backwards Law, Explained Properly

Here is how Watts explained it, and I want to be precise about this because it is easy to misunderstand.

He is not saying that you should be lazy or that effort is pointless. You can and should try things. You practice scales to learn the piano. You run miles to build endurance. Effort is real and it works. The backwards law is about something more specific: it is about the relationship between the ego — the part of you that watches yourself and judges the performance — and the activity itself.

When you practice scales, you are not watching yourself practice scales and evaluating whether you are doing it right in real time. You are just doing it. The moment a musician starts listening to themselves perform with the evaluating, judging, "how am I doing?" mind — the music gets worse. Every musician knows this. The performance that flows is the one where the performer disappears into it. The backwards law is the observation that the thing you want most — the music, the sleep, the ease in a social situation — arrives precisely when you stop reaching for it.

Watts put it this way in The Wisdom of Insecurity: when you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink. But when you try to sink, you float.¹ The body knows how to float. The problem is the mind insisting on managing it.

This is not mysticism. It is a description of how the nervous system works. The part of you that falls asleep is not under conscious control. Neither is the part that produces genuine laughter, or genuine love, or the moment in a conversation when you say exactly the right thing without planning it. You cannot fake these things well enough to fool anyone for long. The best you can do is create conditions where they happen naturally — and that requires getting out of your own way, which is a very specific skill and not at all the same as doing nothing.

A British Man and the River I Grew Up Near

Alan Watts was born in Chislehurst, England in 1915. He spent his life studying Eastern philosophy — Zen Buddhism, Taoism, Vedanta — and translating it for Western audiences who had no framework for it. He was not Asian. He did not grow up in the culture he spent his life explaining. He called himself, with characteristic honesty, "a genuine fake."²

I grew up in the Mekong Delta. The delta is shaped by water — rivers that branch and re-branch across flat land, flooding seasonally, depositing the silt that makes the soil rich. Nothing about life there is in a hurry. The rhythm is the rhythm of water: find the low point, follow the available path, don't force it. You do not argue with the Mekong. You work with its schedule or you don't work at all.

When I first encountered Watts, I kept having the uncanny feeling that he was describing something I already knew but had never had words for. The concept of wu wei — the Taoist principle of non-forcing, of action that flows with the nature of things rather than against it — did not feel like a foreign idea. It felt like a description of the delta. The river does not try to reach the sea. It simply goes where gravity takes it, finding the path of least resistance not through passivity but through perfect attunement to the actual shape of things.

The Mekong Delta — flat land, branching water, slow light. The kind of landscape that teaches patience without ever announcing that's what it's doing.

But here is the interesting thing: the connection I feel to Watts is not really about where I'm from. It is about what the philosophy actually is, which has nothing to do with geography and everything to do with a very specific way of paying attention. Plenty of people from Southeast Asia have never heard of Watts and wouldn't care if they had. Plenty of people from Ohio find him life-changing. The Eastern connection is real — the ideas come from Taoist and Buddhist thought, and there is something about growing up in a culture shaped by those traditions that makes you more permeable to the ideas when you encounter them directly. But that is context, not cause.

The cause is simpler: Watts is describing something true about how things work, and once you've verified it in your own experience, you cannot un-see it.

The Paradox You Can't Think Your Way Out Of

Here is the deepest version of the backwards law, and it's the one that keeps me coming back.

Ask yourself: who is reading this sentence right now?

The obvious answer is "me." But push on that a little. Where exactly is the "me" that is reading? You can describe your name, your history, your opinions — but those are descriptions of you, not you. The experience of reading these words is happening in a particular body, with a particular set of sensations, in a particular moment. Where in all of that is the self?

Watts's answer — drawing from Zen and Vedanta — is that the self you are looking for is the one that is looking. You cannot see your own eyes. You cannot bite your own teeth. The subject can never become its own object. The "you" that is searching for itself is precisely the thing that is doing the searching, which is why the search never ends in the way you expect it to and why the answer, when it arrives, is always obvious: it was the searcher all along.

This sounds abstract, and I want to make it concrete because Feynman was right that if you cannot explain something clearly, you do not understand it yet.

You know the experience of being completely absorbed in something — driving a familiar route, playing music you know well, a conversation that is completely alive. In those moments, the evaluating, judging, "how am I doing?" voice goes quiet. You are not watching yourself; you are just doing the thing. Those moments almost always feel more real, more alive, more like "you" than the moments when you are carefully managing your self-presentation. Watts's observation: that absorbed, unselfconscious state is not a deviation from normal experience. It is what experience actually is when the anxious commentary stops. The commentary is the illusion. The absorption is the reality.

Something that captures absorption — a hand on a camera, tubes glowing in a dark garage, a book open on a table at night. The moment before the mind starts commenting on what it sees.

How It Shows Up in a Normal Life

I am not a philosopher. I'm a father of four who reads too much and thinks about things longer than is probably healthy. What Watts's ideas have given me is not a system or a practice. It is a kind of compass needle that helps me recognize when I am forcing something that should be left alone.

When I was shooting weddings, the photographs that worked were never the ones I was consciously composing. They were the ones I was present for — where I had set up the conditions (lens choice, position, light reading) and then stopped trying to make something happen. The 200mm f/2 at f/2 in decent light is a technical setup. What you do with it, in the moment a groom sees his bride walking toward him, is not technical. You either see it or you don't. Trying to see it is the surest way not to.

The same thing happens late at night in the garage with the headphones on. The sessions that actually land — where the music does what music is supposed to do — are not the ones where I'm evaluating the soundstage or comparing imaging to a reference track. They are the ones where I forget I'm listening and just hear. The equipment recedes. The music is just there. That's the state Watts is pointing at: not trying, not not-trying, just being the thing you are in the moment you're in.

With the kids, it's the clearest of all. The moments I remember as a father are not the ones I planned. They are the ordinary Tuesday moments where nothing in particular was happening and I happened to be fully there. Watts, in a lecture I've listened to maybe a dozen times, says that the reason we feel life is passing us by is that we are mostly living in anticipation of life — waiting for the thing that will finally make us feel like we've arrived.³ The kids are never doing that. They are always exactly where they are. Cody, four months old, has no plan for later. He is just here, completely, which is why watching him is restful in a way that is hard to explain.

The Paradox of the Man Himself

Watts had a complicated life. He drank too much. His marriages fell apart. He was, by most accounts, easier to listen to than to live with. People sometimes use this to dismiss the philosophy — if he had all this wisdom, why couldn't he apply it to his own life?

But this misunderstands what the philosophy is. Watts was not claiming to have achieved a state of permanent enlightened ease. He was describing a structural truth about how consciousness works. Richard Feynman, for his part, was not always a good husband either. The quality of the physics is separate from the quality of the life. You can understand something true and still struggle to live it — that is not hypocrisy, it is just being human.

What Watts did, and what makes him irreplaceable, is that he took ideas that were buried in religious traditions requiring years of study, and he explained them in plain English with enough humor and enough intellectual honesty that you could actually do something with them the same afternoon. He did not demand faith or practice or conversion. He said: here is what these traditions are actually pointing at, here is a way to see it for yourself right now, and then decide what you think.

Why I Keep Coming Back

The reason I return to Watts is not that he solved the paradox. He didn't. He would say, correctly, that the paradox cannot be solved — only dissolved, when you stop framing the situation as a problem that needs solving.

I come back because he reminds me of something I forget constantly: that the present moment is not a waystation on the way to some future moment when things will be sorted out. It is the only moment there is. The planning and the worrying and the optimizing are all happening now. The thing you are waiting to arrive is the life you are already living.

The Mekong doesn't know where it's going. It goes. And it gets there.

"The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves."

That quote has been on this site since I built it. I put it in the philosophy section because it belonged there. But it also belonged in the family section, the health section, the photography section, the audio section. It belongs everywhere a person tends to forget that the point of the thing they are doing is the doing of it — not what the doing will eventually produce.

He figured that out sitting in the West, looking East. I grew up in the East, moved West, and needed him to point me back. Neither of us took the obvious route. That feels right.